“Upstream was the Hollow. People got to calling it Hex Hollow since the first people days. Old bones and old memories. Nellie wacked a thorn-bush aside. She stopped and stretched her back, taking in the sight from the clearing.

The Hollow was scrubby with spindly trees that stuck up like needles around a two-story dump of rotten wood that passed for a house. Just a few hops through the muck eastward was John’s stone abode, more a cave than house. It was no wonder the man drank so much, had to do something to keep the damp out of his bones.

Hills rolled around the structures, curving and sloping into a collection of basins, making any low-lying land perpetually wet, a deep sort of sog that soaked up oily into your boots and made you want to wash your feet.

Nellie didn’t abide by that water a bit.

There’s a difference between good story water and haunted water, a grimy, soak-into-your-bones difference. Nellie had lived here for a long, long time. Long before John moved into his dump of a house, lay in his bed and dreamt up wronging’s encouraged by his whiskey-addled wits.

The sunrise had turned the ground a spongy pink-orange, like bad flesh on a good skull. Smelled about the same too. Nellie had been here long before Nelson and the girls.”